The limits of tolerance: ethics and human nature

At a time when we are struggling with a number of major moral dilemmas, Ivan Tyrrell suggests that the human givens approach can help us reach ethical decisions.

MORALITY— our character, manners and the way we conduct ourselves with others — is currently the subject of considerable attention, producing in the process much confusion, controversy and cant.

Perhaps this has always has been so. But just some of the topics involving moral dilemmas, publicly focused on recently, include: women’s right to technologically assisted birth at 60; human cloning; euthanasia; arms sales to both sides of a major conflict (India and Pakistan); the use of illegal and legal drugs; immigration policy; the rights of people to feel secure in their own land (Israel/Palestine); the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ (more uninvolved civilians have been killed by Americans in Afghanistan than died in the atrocities of September 11 in America last year); political party funding from pornography; sex education in schools; legal penalties for antisocial behaviour; and imprisoning parents for not ensuring their children attend school.

Many of these particular problems didn’t exist a hundred years ago but there is one constant: the large number of people in any age and time who are prepared to take a firm stance on any such issue. We may think we are capable of reaching ethical decisions. Yet all too often we start not with an open mind, prepared to review and consider the full facts, but from a ‘position’.

So it is that, from a religious stance, for instance, some doctors will view the taking of a life as wrong in any circumstances -— thus ruling out abortion and euthanasia. But our biases may be considerably more subtle than that. Our culture has not yet absorbed the important fact that what we view as ethical behaviour is, in fact, socially conditioned, and that moral philosophy merely articulates the morality of some particular social and cultural standpoint.(1)

In one culture, paying prime attention to the needs of each individual may be considered the ethical thing to do, so that everyone has the same opportunities for education, advancement, happiness and so on; whereas, in another, it might be deemed important to give first consideration to how an individual’s behaviour impacts upon the wider group.

At one time in our own recent history, it was accepted that children should be seen and not heard and physical punishments were the means to keep them in line and help them develop into responsible adults. Now, it is viewed as unethical to discipline a child physically in any way — although we have not yet fully thought through how best to deter unruly, disruptive children from running amok in schools and terrorising teachers.

Institutions established as part of the civilising process, to oversee our needs for education, medical and social care, law and order, commerce, etc, all have codes of ethics, yet, on closer inspection, may have much in common with tyrannies. Their major unacknowledged aim is to preserve an existing power structure. Such bodies commonly employ closed systems of thought and have inward-looking agendas that promote a limited, prejudiced view, in order to protect their power base. The true needs of a situation inevitably come second.

For example, doctors may sometimes close ranks to protect one who is responsible for serious medical negligence that has resulted in a personal catastrophe for a patient; social service departments may place the need for the smooth operation of their systems ahead of the needs of the individuals they are supposed to be helping (thus failing to offer practical help at all); judges may rule according to precedent, rather than in the light of the circumstances of particular cases; and businesses may put the need to satisfy their shareholders before the needs of their customers.

If we are truly to act ethically and be capable of making ethical decisions, we have to operate from knowledge, not from a stance which is socially conditioned or which is prompted by unrecognised emotions such as greed and the desire to maintain power. For that to start to be possible, we have to have a fuller understanding of human nature.

Pre-programmed patterns

An interest in dealing with the dilemmas of human behaviour is as old as history. (The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethikos, which means ‘dealing with human nature’.) Our knowledge of how human nature works comes from the scientific study of nature’s endowment to us all — what we now call the ‘human givens’ — and also direct experience, which gives us veridical truth.

The starting point must be that Nature endows each healthy human conception with a wonderful array of living genetic ‘templates’ — an infinitely rich treasure house of pre-programmed patterns for which we instinctively seek completion in the environment as we go through our lives. Babies, for instance, are capable of copying some of the non-verbal behaviours of their mothers, such as facial expression or sticking out their tongues, within just an hour of birth. They also instinctively practise breathing while in the womb, ready for when they must rely on their lungs after birth.

Refinement and adaptation

Such patterns are largely expressed as emotional needs, so that we are driven to seek their fulfilment (babies, for instance, need to create a connection with their main caregivers to ensure their own survival). Throughout life, they are in a state of continuous ebb and flow, refinement and adaptation. Nature is doubly generous in that she also brings us into the world with the means to help us get those needs met. It is precisely the way these needs are met, in the individual circumstances of each of our lives, that determines the individual nature, character and mental health of each person.

Only if enabled to cooperate with the requirements of human nature — the human givens — can children mature into independent, fulfilled and socially integrated adults. Recent discoveries about how the mind/body system works now give us greater insight into this process. The brain is a plastic, problem-solving organ, seeking challenges to meet in order to enable it to grow. Children therefore have to be stretched by their experiences of life if they are to develop well. Mastering any skill, whether riding a bike or learning the violin, takes time and effort — a combination of being drawn forward by the teacher and pushing oneself. There are also certain times when the brain is best equipped to learn — for instance, foreign languages can be best absorbed before the age of 10.

Taking advantage of such knowledge could powerfully improve the way we bring up and educate children. Indeed, we might need to question now whether it is ethical to leave language learning as largely the province of secondary school teaching, or to call ‘education’ the random imposition on children of ideologies, facts and procedures which do not whet their appetites for discovery and mastery. Or, as Thom Hartmann challengingly asserts in his Complete Guide to ADHD (reviewed by Joe Griffin on page 45 of Human Givens Vol. 9 No 2), is it ethical to dismiss as troublesome no-hopers, a huge number of children whose talents and behaviours are different from those of the majority, but which have significant value nevertheless?(2) Such reactions are the result of dogma rather than knowledge.

The importance of shared perceptions

Of the many obstacles which stand in the way of ethical decision making, perhaps the most important is the illusion of shared perceptions, which, consciously or unconsciously, serves to hide ignorance, protect territory, deceive or manipulate. This is largely the result of the language we use, and nowhere is this more plain than in the type of language used to describe ethical behaviour (see “Why abstractions confuse people”).

It is our nature to operate through metaphor and generalisations but, while this can be a great advantage to us, increasing our capacity for conceptualisation, it is also a vulnerability, as explained overleaf. We are social creatures and, unless we have perceptions more or less in common with those around us, it is difficult for us to cooperate, and our interactions at all levels are necessarily more crude. Then it becomes harder to ensure our proper needs are met, and selfish behaviour is more likely to occur.

Ethical decision making within a society is only possible if its members share the majority of their perceptions. Perception is the act of understanding the world by whatever means. Our senses are the channels for information about the world and perception is what our brains do with the information. But first the information is filtered and selected.

The selection process involves matching up the sensory information to what we already know by passing it through the embedded patterns of innate and learned knowledge held mainly in the limbic system and the left and right neocortex. (3,4) The brain in effect compares all new information with its instinctive templates and learned memories of past experiences, and asks, “Is this important survival information — do I need to react? Or is it just interesting, or can I ignore it?”

As the brain discriminates — excluding or accepting information through this filtering process — it is forever building and enriching its internal model of reality. But, inevitably, this model is based on heavily censored input because the discrimination process is influenced by emotion and conditioning. For instance, a young man walking down the street on a warm July day is more likely to be aware of all the attractive young women in their summer clothes than of the unevenness of the cobblestones which preoccupies the old lady behind him. Or, when we applaud the words of a pundit or philosopher and proceed to repeat them to others, it may not be because of the clarity of the case presented but because we happen to agree!

All living creatures, even single-celled ones, that respond to sensations such as heat and cold, light and dark, hard and soft — moving forwards or away — are in effect practising discrimination: we require ‘sensitivity’ in order to discriminate.

The same, in a wider sense, can be said of groups or cultures. Civilisation can only exist when enough people share similar perceptions about the nature of the world and their place within it. The more refined, or subtle, the level of generally shared perceptions within a particular culture, the more highly civilised it is likely to become. In other words, a society in which there is a high level of dissent about what constitutes acceptable behaviour in people’s dealings with one another, or where there is an unwillingness to establish and abide by laws, operates at a cruder level than one where there is accord about such matters.

Thus, I would suggest, civilised (moral) behaviour is not a static achievement; it is a process involving the refinement of shared perceptions, the discrimination of countless shades of grey. We can see that, whenever this process is halted or reversed, the organisation or culture concerned ‘freezes’ and becomes intolerant. It then degenerates and eventually collapses, as happened in many ancient empires and more recently, in spectacular fashion, in the Soviet Union.

To increase our understanding of the friction between cultures today, and the predicaments of being human in a crowded world, we need to work at refining our perceptions as far as we possibly can. That means enlarging our perspective with the aid of the knowledge available to us from history, anthropology and psychology, to enable us better to see the bigger picture – the view beyond our own individual outlook or take on events.

Needs and wants

Looking at life from different perspectives inevitably brings about a greater understanding of others’ needs and wants, which may conflict with our own. Ethical dilemmas mainly seem to arise whenever circumstances are preventing someone’s physical or emotional needs from being fairly met, perhaps because they are in apparent conflict with those of another individual or organisation. The woman of 60 who wants to bear a child, because technology now makes it possible for her to be helped to do so, may want a child because she has been unable to conceive before, or because she has lost a child, or because her children are grown up and she feels her life lacks purpose without a caretaking role.

Perhaps, however, it might be considered that her need to be needed could be better met in a different way. The medical authorities may feel that she has as much right as anyone else to an assisted pregnancy; or that her needs are secondary to those of younger women; or that the pregnancy would be dangerous; or that it is inappropriate for a post-menopausal woman to bear a child when that is plainly against Nature’s intent. Others might argue that the menopause, which used to signal the decline of a woman’s life, now commonly occurs less than two thirds of the way through it, when women are still very healthy and active.

Yet others may be concerned that the unborn child’s needs conflict with those of the mother, if it is in the best interests of a child to have a parent

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This article was first published in 2002 in Volume 9, No, 2 of the Human Givens journal.

IVAN TYRRELL is an experienced psychotherapist. He teaches effective counselling skills at MindFields College, was a founding member of the European Therapy Studies Institute (ETSI) and co-developer of the human givens approach. He is a Fellow of the Human Givens Institute.

For more information on ethics also see:

> The interview: 'Knowledge beyond words: confusion and ethics'

> HGI Ethics Policy